Tag - Invisible Studio

Folded Roof, Essex

Progress on a new timber studio building that is currently on site in Essex.

Categories Projects Tags

Separated By 10 Years

Much has been written – particularly by Jeremy Till – about architects’ obsession with the fiction of the image of the just completed building, from which people, possessions, time and entropy are banished. For many architects this point, with the illusion of control, is the fleeting moment that represents a kind of perfection – which the reality can never match. We’ve been guilty of that at times. But also, we’ve come to enjoy the delicious anarchy of occupation that comes with life, and believe strongly that architecture at its best can cope with this. These two photographs above were taken exactly 10 years apart, and show the effect of the passage of time on Moonshine.

Categories Moonshine Tags

On Drawing

While drawings obviously have a key role in design, they need to be tools to assist and develop the understanding of design, rather than as immutable instructions defining fully the fabrication of a full scale piece. Drawings can take on a different status in a reimagined and reconfigured design process. These drawings are of the are loose, open ended sort, and a correlative part of the process of construction – not fixed before hand and bereft of the real discoveries that take place during fabrication. The conventional architectural drawing idealises construction, and typically uses a strange kind of scaled code to represent an idealised set of relationships where uncertainties and contingencies are impossible. Jonathan Hill, in the ‘Illegal Architect’ talks of how the drawing is used as a control mechanism by architects to eliminate the possibilities of contingencies creeping in. He talks of the ‘artistic creation of an individual in command of a drawing who designs a building in a studio’. While at best drawing is a process that encourages thinking, to the point that at best drawing is thinking – for me it is more exciting when construction is thus, and alongside this, the ‘drawing’ happens in real time, real scale, and in three dimensions.

Categories Studio in the Woods Tags

Westonbirt, Mess Building

The Mess Building at Westonbirt is currently being prepared for tender, and is likely to be live on the Forestry Commission Website at the end of March. It is a new, purpose built mess facility for the tree team, built using Westonbirt’s own timber.

Categories Uncategorized Tags